Tag Archives: marvel

How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science: Lisa Grossman, writer of "Of Geeks and Girls", responds to some Hacker News comments: “The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and thatâ€™s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.”

Dear Marvel Comics: Rusalka appreciates Marvel Comics’ efforts to spotlight female superheroes in comics. But why are they spotlighted as “girls” or “ladies” rather than “women”?

Management changes at Canonical: Jane Silber, current COO of Canonical Ltd, will take over from Mark Shuttleworth as CEO in March 2010. (Canonical is a company owned by Shuttleworth and is the sponsor of Ubuntu development among other ventures.) There’s been much discussion around the Linuxosphere (Linux.com, Slashdot, LWN), but most of it around Shuttleworth’s decision.

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When is rape not rape? When it’s a supervillain pretending to be Peter Parker and having sex with Parker’s roommate, who thinks she’s having sex with Parker himself, according to one of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man writers.

The writer, Fred Van Lente, responds:

My understanding of the definition of rape is that it requires force or the threat of force, so no. Using deception to trick someone into granting consent isnâ€™t quite the same thing.

Which is not to say it isnâ€™t a horrible, evil, reprehensible thing that Chameleon did. He is a bad man.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart. Newsweek describes Lise Eliot’s book Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gapsâ€”And What We Can Do About It, in which she reviews evidence that parents cause the differences in infant behaviour that some people claim is innate.

laughingrat on Impostors: “I wonder if, for instance, my college adviser would have been able to get away with pretending I was too stupid for graduate school–he said as much to me in a slightly gentled-up fashion–if I hadn’t myself learned to be so self-deprecating.”

FemaleScienceProfessor asks people to start seeing micro-inequities, those little niggling incidents that are so easily written off as probably not sexist, just someone having a bad day, or being a jerk.

Greta Christina discusses sexism and racism in the skeptical and atheist communities, and about how being white and male-dominated will perpetrate itself in unhelpful ways. There is some overlap between these communities and geekdom, so it isn’t surprising to hear that some of the defensiveness is similar.